RIPE 82
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Plenary session
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17 May 2021
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10:30 a.m. CET
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RIPE 82
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MIRJAM KUHNE: Good morning everyone, I hope you can hear me. It is 10:30, but let's just wait a couple more minutes till everybody got their coffee from the barista ‑ oh, no, we don't have a barista. At least I don't have one in my house.
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Right. I think we should start because we have a full agenda. Good morning, good afternoon, good night everyone, wherever you are. My name is Mirjam Kuhne, and I am the RIPE Chair since last year, September. We also have a Vice‑Chair, Niall O'Reilly, who is here also behind the scenes, and will jump in if anything is missing or not working.
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We have over ‑‑ we can move on ‑‑ sorry, I need to tell Rob is in the background, who is controlling the slide for me because it's just so convenient for me, of course I have to tell him. Actually, in the meantime, I find out we have over 1,000 registrations. Not everybody is here, obviously, but I hope to see most of you all during the week in various sessions.
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This is our third virtual RIPE meeting. Just a amazing if you think of it, already three meetings online. I have also find it amazing what this community has done during this pandemic. One is relying on the Internet and it has become such an important tool. I think that's all to you and you should be proud of that, you keep the Internet running and stable and accessible for everyone in this community, but also for everyone else.
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Now, remember especially at the beginning of the pandemic where operators were really like helping each other out, calling each other if somebody needed anything in the data centre or any other help, and I thought it was like in the true RIPE spirit where a lot of collaboration and cooperation going on. So, that's wonderful to see.
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Obviously this community also thrives a lot on trust and informal information exchange and it's really hard to build kind of a trust relationship with somebody on the screen, especially for newcomers, for new people, so let's look out for each other during this week and also outside the meetings and I would especially like to welcome the new participants here and I hope to see you during the week.
Now we can move on. Just as a reminder, this is open to everyone. We bring people together from different backgrounds, cultures, countries, expertise, beliefs and so forth, and we are providing a safe, supportive and respectful environment.
And therefore, in the next slide you can see our Code of Conduct which we have ‑‑ you should have seen when you registered, it's also available on the RIPE 82 website. And it basically says that we welcome diversity of views and different expertise and background and that we treat each other with tolerance and respect. And in case ‑‑ and we don't accept and tolerate like any, you know, bullying or threatening or harming each other. And on the next slide, you can see so if something is happening, I mean that you don't like or you experience bad behaviour, anything, if you have you are uncomfortable with, these two wonderful people, Rob and Vesna are our trusted contacts for the RIPE meetings. They have been trained especially for this role, and they are reachable on this e‑mail address but you can also set up private conversations with them on Zoom or on SpacialChat, and then all reports are going to be handled confidentially and only they will see them. So please don't hesitate to contact them if there is anything you think is not right.
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The next slide, we are actually working on a new Code of Conduct to expand the one that we have currently on the website and be a bit more explicit, also laying out what good behaviour is, what we like to see people doing at the RIPE meetings or in the RIPE community and so this task force has been set up some time ago and we have published a draft document in March, and it actually has received a lot of support and constructive suggestions on the RIPE list. It's just really ‑‑ you want to see, it's good. They are now working on the last two closing last loops in the actual Code of Conduct document, and will be holding a BoF on Tuesday to talk about the next steps, like the next two documents that are laid out in their Charter, that is how to set up the Code of Conduct team and how to do the reporting. So I would really like to encourage you to pay attention to this and to attend the BoF as I think this is an important foundation for our community to have a good Code of Conduct in place that we can all subscribe to.
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On the next slide you can see the meeting plan for this week. It's quite full, it's a full week. I wish we could have, you know ‑‑ I remember the last meeting or the one before it was almost like we only had half a week, but actually from the feedback we received last time, we extended the breaks so we provided more space in between the sessions and also some sessions are longer to allow for more discussion in the sessions.
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Again, we will only have one stream, no parallel sessions. You can find in all the sessions behind this Meetecho link so they will all be on this Meetecho platform, I will get to some more information about that. And today is a full day of Plenary sessions, Plenary talks. And then on Thursday, Wednesday ‑‑ Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, there will be Working Group sessions, and then on Friday we have a short morning with a Community Plenary that I also hope to see many of you at the end of the week. So let's move on to the next slide.
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You will see a whole slide with all the faces of all the Working Group Chairs who are responsible for the bulk of the week, like the Working Group sessions in the next few days. And there are some Working Groups that have a group Chair selections going on right now, I believe in the Address Policy, IoT and IPv6 Working Groups, and there were already nominations on the lists and support I think the decisions will be announced during the week.
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On the next slide, you will see the Programme Committee and these are the people, the volunteers, who are responsible for the RIPE programme that you will see today during the Plenary session, and there are two seats available, and on the next slide you can see how you you can vote for new PC members. Two seats are available and you can still nominate yourself or somebody else, and voting starts tomorrow and Tuesday and Wednesday all week, and then on Friday we will announce the results during the Closing Plenary.
And there is also a document on the RIPE website, if you want to know a bit more what the Programme Committee actually does and how much time it takes. You have to go to ripe.net, not the meeting website but to ripe.net and then go to the Programme Committee and find information there if you are unsure ‑‑ maybe you want to nominate yourself.
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Now, talking about elections, there are also elections for the Number Resource Organisations Number Council, I think it's called, which is basically the representation from this community and to the Number Council also serves as the Address Supporting Organisation Address Council in ICANN. So Filiz Yilmaz has stepped downed and her term ends on the 31st May. I'd really like to express my thanks again to Filiz here. I think she has done great work representing this community together with the other two members of the committee ‑‑ of the Council, Nurani and Erve, and I'm sure we will miss Filiz on the team but there will be a new member and there are elections this week. Everybody can vote, everybody who has checked in at the RIPE and for the RIPE meeting and you have received a mail this morning on how to do that, how to check in on your registration page. And then you can register for the elections and then you can vote on Thursday, from Thursday to Friday there is some information here and there will also be information spread over the week, I believe also in the intermission slides on the website and again the results will be announced on Friday in the Closing Plenary.
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Right. I just wanted to highlight some topics during the week that may be ‑‑ I just picked out. As I said the Programme Committee has provided us with some really interesting presentations this week. The usual technical topics obviously that are relevant to all of us, there may be are some unusual presentations as well, and today I think right after this in the morning session, there will be a session on community wellbeing, or it's called the resilience of the human network, that Erik Bais is providing and is presenting, just in collaboration with a few other community members and it's based on a survey that was sent out to the community a few weeks ago, and I mean this is really topic also close to my heart because I think we are all humans in the end and we have been suffering through this pandemic, as I said earlier we really need to look out for each other and I hope activities like this can help with that.
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Another interesting topic I find important to this community, and maybe a little bit neglected over the last year or so, is encryption, and we all kind of take it for granted, but maybe it isn't, it's under threat constantly from other interests and there is a presentation later today both showing the technical side and also the policy side and what we can do as a community.
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Then there are a couple of BoFs. I mentioned Code of Conduct BoF already, that's tomorrow, and today afternoon there is a BoF by the team that also organised the BoF last time, SCION, it's a new Internet architecture, routing architecture that they are working on, kind of came of out of the academic ‑‑ of an academic research project and it's kind of making its way into the community and the SCION team would like to possibly setup a working group or interact in other ways more with the RIPE community. I'd like to hear some feedback from the community about that. So I'd like to encourage you to participate in that BoF later today.
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The other task force that is currently running is the RIPE ‑‑ in addition to the Code of Conduct task force, we have the RIPE Database Requirements Task Force, they are the BoF ‑‑ they had a BoF on the 5th May, earlier before the RIPE meeting, and the recordings and minutes and slides, they will be available on the task force page shortly, later today or during the week. And they will also be available during the week to further talk about the financial draft they would like to present.
Time is running out so I will move on.
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RIPE Community Plenary is on Friday, and nothing is surprising really, I'll give a short update of what the RIPE Chair team has been doing and then there will be reports from the task forces and also from the IANA Numbering Services Review Committee, which is not on here yet, but Nurani will talk to us about that.
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If we move on. Just on logistics, you have all found your way to the Meetecho platform here, so, you need to be registered and you have received one unique link that you should use for all sessions during the week. Please don't lose it. Everything is on this platform. The livestream stenography, Q&A, chat, you have obviously found I can see, and yes, just go back one quickly ‑‑ not so fast. I just want to point out there is also livestreaming page on the RIPE 82 website and we are also streaming it on YouTube this time but obviously there is no Q&A and no chat available there, and the recordings will all be uploaded on the website so everything is recorded, please be aware of that.
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Next: A couple of buttons here that you are probably familiar from last time, those who were here last time. Under your name you will see a number of icons to request audio and video and under that there is a whole row of icons that ‑‑ you know, a question mark for Q and A, and you have the stenography, the chat, and you can also separate the chat, have it in a separate window and you can use emoticons, that was a big request from last time so that should work now. There was a little icon for policy that we might be using from time to time and obviously the participants list and you can also now search for participants in there.
I am sure you will get through that during the week, let's move on to some fun stuff. There will be some session events during the week. Today there will be two short social events on SpacialChat where you can first meet the RIPE Chair team, like Niall and myself and ask us anything you might to know about the RIPE community, and then right after that there is a Meet the Board, the RIPE NCC Executive Board also on SpacialChat.
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On Thursday, we'll have the RIPE dinner, and the RIPE NCC has provided some fun activities again, because I believe it's Eurovision week and there will be some talents, choosing the stars from the community, you can find all this on the website on the social event.
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Now, obviously we are here also to network with each other, not just to listen to presentations and there are a number of tools that we provide. It's kind of the next best thing to seeing each other face‑to‑face. There is a SpacialChat here, I'd really like to encourage you to hang out there if you have time during the breaks or in the morning. Unfortunately, you have to bring your own coffee, but yeah, so there will be a number of rooms that you can use and hang out and find the other attendees.
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There is another option for networking, that's the app on your mobile device, the agenda, all the attendees, you can set up individual chats or, you know, meetings with people, and through that and then meet and some other platform that you choose.
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And then, last but not least, there is the attendees list, and you can enable social contacts there and you can find other people on the attendees list and then contact them there. And I would like to stress, maybe, that's not necessary, but obviously all these networking facilities aren't really meant for commercial purposes, but for hang out and networking and seeing each other, you know, even if you can't do it face‑to‑face.
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On the next slide you will see our wonderful sponsors. I mean, thanks to all the sponsors that are sponsoring us, even in these virtual times, and they are mostly sponsoring the meeting tools that we are providing here during the meeting, like Meetecho and SpacialChat and the Kahoot quizzes, so thanks to the sponsors.
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Right, again, last but not least on the next slide, just a bit of a reminder again. I think, you know, you should be proud of what you have done during this pandemic, it's still going on, keeping the Internet running and safe and stable, and, just as a reminder, I think as a community we stand for coordination, knowledge‑sharing, and I kind of stole this from Rob Blokzijl, he also said this on the slide: Open, open, open, that we are really open to new participants, new developments, new circumstances in the evolutions in the Internet, and I think it's important to stress that. Obviously there are some challenges facing this community, there are technical challenges, you know, regulations, what have you, and of course this pandemic in itself, and I think as a community we really need to show and demonstrate that we are an important voice in the operations of the Internet and an essential player in the whole Internet governance ecosystem, I think we have really showed that the last year and we need to continue to do that.
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Unfortunately, again, we miss face‑to‑face meetings. I was looking at this picture there, that was from Rotterdam, I put a sticker over it. Unfortunately, we are now virtual, but with all the great meeting tools that the NCC is providing, I'm really looking forward to a great week and to engage with you all and I hope you will enjoy the week. And I'll see you on SpacialChat.
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Just last slide here. Contact details for the RIPE Chair team. You can contact us individually or also as a team.
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That's it from me. I don't know if we have time for questions. Jan is keeping track of time and he is in charge. So let us know, let me know how you want to move on...
JAN ZORZ: I don't think there are any questions.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Well, okay. That's good. Then we can move on, and I'll see you all later in SpacialChat. In the social, you can ask me anything you want.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I see that I'm next on the agenda. I was waiting for a cue to step in, but I'll just jump in then.
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My names is Hans Petter Holen, I am the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC, the Network Coordination Centre, and I have had this job for a year. While I have moved to Amsterdam last year, I am still stuck in Norway due to the travel restrictions. The RIPE NCC office has been closed for more than a year now and we are working fully remotely. All our events have been converted to a virtual format. For the larger events like this one we are also working closer with Meetecho to enhance the meeting works experience and not just relying on industry standard tools.
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For those of you who don't know, RIPE NCC is a membership organisation, we have around 20,000 members. It was formed in 1992, and today we have 170 staff, managed by me and my team, and we are overseen by an Executive Board elected by the members of the association.
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Our function is both to be the secretariat for the RIPE community and to be the regional Internet registry for central Asia, Middle East and Europe. We provide services for the members and the community, paid by the membership fee. Most notable services are, as you probably know, the RIPE registry where we register who is using what Internet resources, the members can look into and update this through the LIR portal. We have the RIPE database where the members register additional information and we have the RPKI, the resource public key infrastructure service where resources like IP addresses and ASNs can be signed, so you can secure your BGP routing announcement.
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We also have services like the routing information service where we collect BGP routing information from all around the world. RIPE Atlas, with more than 10,000 measurement probes that you can run your measurements; and RIPE Stat, where you can have a peak into the data that we have collected.
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We are not just about numbers, although that's our main activity. We also run one of the route name service, the k.root and an alt DNS service for in‑addr.arpa and secondary name services.
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And I see in the chat that you are missing the slides and, yes, I haven't made any slides for this. I thought I'd just briefly take you through this talk without having any slides.
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And last but not least, we are doing online learning and in person when it's possible as well as professional certifications, which is an important area moved forward. The Executive Board is governing the organise, we have regular board meetings where we discuss RIPE NCC strategy and important matters for the RIPE NCC, and there is a mailing list, members discuss where we share announcements and discuss with members. There is a session in the evening today where you can meet the board and ask them any questions you may have to them. The General Meeting is on Wednesday at six o'clock and only members can attend there. You need to register separately and voting is done electronically. However, the presentations of the RIPE NCC Services are done in the Services Working Group just before that, and that is open to anyone.
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On the GM agenda, the financial report from 2020, revised charging scheme 2022 and election of the two of the seven board members.
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As a secretariat of the community, we organise this meeting as well as regional meetings like the ENOG, MENOG and SCE, and with that, welcome to this meeting. I wish I could have met you all in person, but if you have questions for me, I will hang out in SpacialChat by the fireplace in some of the breaks. So with that, thank.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: Okay. Thank you, Hans Petter. From here, we will take over as the PC and let me introduce the PC from our work perspective, what we have done so far.
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Welcome to another virtual RIPE meeting. We, as the PC, have done our best to put together a great Plenary programme to inform you and inspire you in all of these difficult times. Here again, Mirjam already showed them to you, all my great colleagues with whom I had the pleasure to put this programme together.
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Let me quickly walk you through the day we will have together. On Monday, we are all responsible for the Plenary, so you will see four 60‑minute slots, so we enlarged the slots so that we have more time for discussions. Our timings are still quite tight, so please be precise your questions. We will have full length presentations and four lightning talks, so they are supposed to be short presentations where you can pitch ideas, have discussions afterwards, and you are warmly invited to afterwards meet in SpacialChat and discuss in a more lengthy fashion the topics that you were most interested in.
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Please give us feedback. We are not only interested in rated talks, but we also want the feedback on the meeting format because this meeting comes together based on the work of a great team and we have spent a lot of time discussing on timings, on online settings. We all hope it's going to be the last time that we meet virtually, but nobody is really sure. So if you are enjoy something which is this time, if you are a new member of the community and are joining for the first time and you notice something, please tell us, you will see a feedback form at the end of the meeting.
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Please help us to do our job: Rate the talks, every talk in the Plenary session has a 'rate the talk' button. We will read all of these ratings and make a more informed decision next year.
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So, Mirjam already told you that, but also, from my perspective, please, please, please participate in the PC elections. Two seats are open for election and you can participate either by nominating yourself for the PC, if you have any question regarding that just contact us, we are around in SpacialChat, in Meetecho, we can be reached by a mail, and we can answer all of the questions you have. But you can also participate by voting for the PC. You can see the PC candidate biographies on the RIPE meeting website and then you can what those people have to say about themselves.
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And with that, I welcome our first Plenary presentation. Christian Adell will talk to us on what we could improve on our circuit management. So, Christian, the floor is yours!
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: Let me share my screen!
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Welcome to this session. How to handle your circuit maintenances proactively. I'm really excited to be here because it's the first time I am going to talk about these open source project and I can't imagine a better audience for this. Probably while you are watching this presentation, a maintenance for one of your network bits will be [something] and as the movie title says, the good, the bad and the ugly, you have three ways to handle this. The bad: Do nothing, ignore it and let it happen; manually handle it; or the good one, automate it, and this is the one I will try to help you with today.
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Just a few words about me. I am a network engineer for automation working at network to code. Maybe you already know about the company, but for who is the first time that hears about it it's a network automation company helping others on the network automation journey, with training, consulting and implementation. It started from the community around our flag channel with more than 18,000 people today and still keeps the community and open source projects in its DNA.
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In case you would like to get more information about me or just reach out to me on these pages.
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We will start first understanding what the problem we are trying to solve today and then present the things that will help us to solve this, then we will see a demo to show how this works because I believe that's better.
The problem. As I said, most people are managing networks built on top of a lot of circuits and every circuit will have maintenances throughout its lifecycle. Every maintenance will have an impact on your operations, maybe you have to do some network changes or do am unearthing. If you don't do this properly, maybe it will impact your business because the traffic will not be handled properly. Doing this tasks manually it go be done in a proper way is time‑consuming and prone to errors. To make this even more complicated, every provider uses different notification formats.
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My firsthand experience and others gave they this estimation. Around 3 maintenances facility per year will happen. And in some customers, for instance, reported up to 50 maintenances per day on average. Considering around one hour to work on these circuit before prior and post operations, you can do a quick maths to understand how much engineering time is spent in this problem.
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In short, what we want to do is move from the manual operator, analysing the handling the change to dynamic approach where all the processing is done by your network automation. Every network automation starts from the route. The find the network and the network automation will take this information to enforce this. The route will contain for instance all the IP information or the right information like the BGP neighbours that you have to configure and much more. So, it can configure your network into the desired estate. Usually this intent is static and controlled by the network engineering team but here we are introducing a dynamic intent. Using the information that you are going to gather from your external network providers this will add new challenges into the way that you handle this data because you have to fix data, you have to parse this data to accommodate into you're route, then store and finally organise this data and link to the rest of objects that you already have in your route.
As you see may guess, we are not the first trying to solve this. Some of you already have some customer scripts trying to solve this for your network. Also, some people in NANOG 2016 created a draft to define how an idea maintenance certification should look like and how to prevent it using iCalendar format. But the reality is in a lot network providers have allotted it, around thousands of them, there is still a lot that new models and formats.
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It's also worth to mention an open source project that tries to solve the name issue, Janitor, but in this we are proposing a very different approach and the approach is basically to apply the divide and conquer strategy. Here we propose to slit the problem into parts. First a parser library that go only focus on taking any format from any provider and transform it a structure object following the previously draft. So we keep the same idea but extending the coverage to whatever formats they provide. Then, on the right side you have a sort of tool extension that will use this parser library in order to get the notifications, parse these with this information, just link all these information together with the rest of your route and expose this to external integrations like UI, or maybe REST API or GraphQL. This enable the community to take one or both solutions independently. Could you use the parser library in your customer scripts or maybe just use the user route solution.
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I presented the first character of this. The circuit maintenance parser. This is a Python library that has a really simple goal: Just take whatever data structure you are going to handle and convert into something that we can understand consistently, we adopted the format mentioned about from the NANOG meeting, and it's going to be the reference that all the different notifications will be translated too. In this case we see ‑‑ in example we see one notification following the eye calendar, that's straightforward, but that is going to work for this TML format or database ‑‑ once.
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As a Python library the usage and is easy. You initial lies the parser, if you don't define which format you are going to use we assume the iCalendar but you can just choose which one that you want to use, then you process the notification that could contain multiple maintenances and finally just use this object. Currently, the parser is not support to a lot of providers but we expect to be having more and more, the library is not basis a community.
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Second character is going to provide the interface, to use this library within our recently launched open source project called Nautobot. Maybe you already are aware of this from the net box project that is based in Python, Django. This is Version 2.10.3, that is a sponsoring network to code and tries to expend this and also incorporate it as a network automation platform. Nautobot stays in the centre of network information strategy providing an extensible data model and also a slot of interface to say interact with. So it's based foundation in order to add new functionalities into this solution.
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This makes this possible. First important thing is the plugin. So this follows an micro cardinal idea, or architecture, that you can, you can keep adding several plugins depending on the needs that you have. Actually the circuit maintenance is a plugin that we are using for Nautobot, it also uses several solutions like data validation, just to create the data that is coming in, very important when you are taking live data from external sources, extends current data models and obviously we are going to add new models into these routes, also allows to you run a single job, in order to extend the execution and new API integrations.
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In short, Nautobot is a route that is easy to extend, it allows multiple integrations and is a plugin system and it aims to facilitate the development of new network automaton applications.
The architecture that we present today in this solution, in this plugin, is just ‑‑ in orange here, you can see a provider and a circuit. These two objects are models that exist in Nautobot and this plugin is extending them a bit, in order to be able to link them to the star of this system, that is the circuit maintenance. So the main goal of this plugin is to be able to create in your route this circuit maintenance object, that as you can see is connected to a circuit so we'll have this information related and this circuit is going to be created from a notification. To make this happen we have to operate in our job that it will fetch notification from external sources, maybe a mailbox, whatever the source is, and then using the circuit maintenance parser library is going to be able to get all this information, get it into data so that it can be understood and finally create the circuit maintenance.
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Obviously, this information is the one that will be consumed by the network automation in order to do whatever you want to do with this information.
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So now, it's time for a demo. I want to show you how this looks like. We see here a Nautobot, a Nautobot has an UI that we can see is a route so you can see the information about how to model your network, you have information about the organisation site, the data centre, about racks, devices, also an iPALM, also has this information.
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As you can see in this image, pretty much everything is zero so we don't have a lot of data to focus on what is important for this plugin, but are the providers and the circuits. So in a provider you can imagine how this is going to look like, you can have a list of your providers, in this case we are going to use NTT because it's one of the ones that we support in the parser library. So, in this information, we can see the information that you are going to add to NTT. This is part of the core data model, and you can ‑‑ because everything is linked together, we have the list of the circuits that belong to NTT. Three circuits in this case.
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If you go to a circuit you can get information about the circuit itself, the type of the circuit. So all the data that reaches your route in order to be usable by your network automation.
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What we are presenting today is the plugin circuit maintenance, circuit maintenance as we can see here, we don't have any circuit maintenance because it's a fresh run, so we don't have anything in place. The other object that is important for the plugin are the notification that is we don't have anyone in place. What we have is some sources configured. In this case, we only have one that is a mailbox that I am using in order to fetch NTT notifications. And in order to make this happen, and to run all the processes that these are single route job I can go into day jobs, and try to run this job. If I run this job now, I go anything is going to happen. Why? Because I don't have any notifications, so it's saying I am connected to the source of notifications, and nothing is there for you.
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So in the back‑end I am going to send a mail with a notification that is creating a maintenance with a specific status, so let me send the mail. The mail has been sent. And now I can run the job again. Go to the job. Imagine that in production you can have a lot of different jobs, this is just a specific one for this plugin. And if I run the job now, something is going to change.
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First thing is here you have all the logs of the things that have happened. The first thing we created a role notification so something was received from the source of information, and we can see all the information that was related. We identified who was the provider, what was the source of this information, and the role notification. As I mentioned before, this is an iCalendar format following the recommendation created created in 2016 NANOG, and you can see there is a maintenance affecting several devices with different impacts.
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The important point here is that you can see this has been parsed and the parsing happened because we were using the library, and the good thing, and it was nice to see that the demo has not filed today, we see that it was parsed as true, so if we move to the parse notification, we can see the object that was created from the iCalendar, this is the kind evidence object that the library produces, so we see all the information, and the information for every specific circuit.
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Finally, you can see that these role notification that was parsed initiated a maintenance. So this maintenance that we can link from here but we can also check in the circuit maintenances, we see that the circuit maintenance created that was coming from the notification, the status is confirmed. The information, what you can see on this maintenance? Obviously, all the information about when this starts, when this ends. We also added a field just to let an operator to acknowledge if it has something or not. You can just take your idea about what this means.
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Then you have all the circuits that has been connected to this maintenance. If you remember from the notification, there were four different circuits, but only three were added here. Why? Because in the database, we only had three circuits, but the tool understood that, yeah, was there a circuit in the maintenance that it's not referenced in your database? So this is just a warning because maybe you are missing this information in your database. You can update your database with the circuit, run the job again and this will provide you with the information.
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Everything in this sort of through this hyperlink so you can see the information jump into the circuit, will jump into the circuit and the information is also redirectional, so you also have the other circuit maintenance that are affecting the circuit for you.
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Finally, in this circuit maintenance, we also have notifications related to this job. What does it mean? Now, the circuit maintenance is confirmed, it's something that go goes to happen. You take this information into account. But imagine that now any notification is coming in so what I'm going to do is send another notification cancelling this maintenance. I am going to send a notification. And the mail is sent and to show you something different because maybe you are wondering why only the UI interaction. All that you can expose as UI can be exposed as an API. So I'm going to change my screen to another window where I have a rest client. You see, the rest client, in this case, targeting the same job that I was trying before in the UI. Now is going to be triggered via an API. I can trigger the job and you are going to see that because this is a single job, you only get the circuit has been scheduled so it's pending. Now I'm going to jump again back to the demo. And the point here that I want to show you is ‑‑ so, now what we see here is that do you see the status is confirmed? We still ‑‑ if we refresh, it is still confirmed or not? No, it has changed to cancelled because the maintenance received another notification that we understood it was linked to the same maintenance, and we ‑‑ like, we moved the maintenance from confirmed to cancelled so it's a complete lifecycle of the maintenance. We can check this job, execution, we can check on the job results to see what was ‑‑ what happened on this operation. The job that we triggered before the API, we can see that there was not any maintenance, we understood that it was the same as we had before, and we changed from created to updated. We changed the status of this maintenance.
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This is a quick demo to show you that you can interact with this, the you can also interact via REST API and also we have the FQL API.
So let's continue with the presentation, trying to show you what the potential use cases that you can leverage with this project.
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First is pretty obvious, it's just reporting and alerting, and you can imagine that having all this information about circuit maintenances you can understand how many maintenances have happened during the time, how much down time happened also for appeared of time, and because these is coming from a circuit maintenance that is linked to a circuit and a circuit a linked to a provider, you can correlate all this information and maybe go to your next provider with all this information. You can know how many maintenances have been scheduled for a particular circuit and you can understand what the strategy to improve this.
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Also something that is really interesting is alerting. So maybe detecting overlapping on maintenances. You could have a pointer present with two transits from different providers that by chance they agree independently to schedule a maintenance that is overlapping in two hours. So maybe this point of present will be completely blackholed. Maybe you know this information, you can change the schedule of these maintenances.
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Let's think a bit bigger. What have leveraging this data that is coming from the circuit maintenance, your note work automation can do multiple things. Send notifications, maybe send the message notification for a mail notification to your network operation team, whatever you think about spreading the word, maybe you can send to the a branch that will be affected, whatever. You can also update or change the statement you are alerting and routing if a maintenance it coming, maybe I can ignore it, a link is down, maybe you can mute notification and not get a page in the middle of the night.
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Finally, you can do even something better that is understanding that a circuit maintenance is going to happen some time before this happens, you can connect to your network, drag out the traffic from your circuits and when the change is completed, you can just bring traffic into the circuit. Obviously this is ‑‑ this is not because you don't trust your network provider but you do things better if you can do your job on your side.
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And if we still think a bit bigger, we can think about these self‑healing networks, what this means? You imagine that you can have a capacity to take information about the performance of your circuits from an vantage point, you can correlate information and maybe conclude that one of your ISPs in one point of present is not behaving as you expect from your creativity about latency, having all this information in a database and processing all this logic could conclude that maybe for a specific circuit a circuit maintenance that is not coming from the provider but you can access the API, you could create your custom circuit maintenance for a period of time saying, okay, something is wrong with this circuit, let's leave it running in ‑‑ as a maintenance. So, if you create this object and your network automation is directed as we showed before, you could change the status of your network and maybe proactively shut down a circuit for a while until this recovers the network performance.
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As a wrap‑up of the session, I just encourage you to try it. This is an open source project, two open source projects, so you can take one or the other and just use it for your benefit. We expect obviously to extend the support of the parsers and this will come from the community. So for some providers will be pretty easy because if they follow the iCalendar format that I mentioned before, it's going to be just a mapping. But for your customer provider, you can just contribute and the whole community will benefit from them
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For the plugin, we are thinking of the providing a reporting view that will help you to present this information that I was talking before. And also all these are integrations that you can add some logic in order to change or to alert when something bad is going to happen.
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As you can imagine, the most benefit of this solution is try to schedule these periodically, so not run one ‑‑ run every now and then, maybe 20 minutes, whatever you want to run this update of circuit maintenances. There is no circuit today in the solution, there is in the roadmap for Nautobot in the next release, hopefully soon, but as I show you in the demo having an external REST API is always something you can connect to and trigger on your external job. So it's something that can be achieved. Also, we are thinking on extending the route integration from external that now is only supported for a mailbox but eventually everything could be and, hopefully soon, a stable release of this submissions.
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The references here, you will see what I'm talking about about the maintenance certification improvement using iCalendars, and actually the draft that was created by the operation group in NANOG, you have also the reference to Nautobot, to the circuit maintenance plugin for Nautobot, and the circuit maintenance parser, so you have all that you need in order to set this up and run it.
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Last but not least, I want to thank the team, and also a great friend that inspired me with this idea of improving circuit maintenances.
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So thank you very much for your time. And if you have any questions...
JAN ZORZ: Hello. So my name is Jan Zorz, for those of you who don't know me. I am the RIPE Programme Committee co‑chair and I will take of the rest of this session.
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I would like to mention one thing. We would prefer you to ask your own questions, so please join the audio queue and ask your own question. There is also option of Q&A, we have two questions in the Q&A that I will read the first one now, but we will not ask questions that come over the chat. We don't have the capacity to follow all these tools together.
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And the first question is: Hey, Christian, just wondering how many different formats have you seen in terms of circuit maintenance notifications? Are there any vendors mailing to implement the standard notification?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: In my experience dealing with multiple vendors, I have seen formats from Anymail, Rotext, JSON, so, multiple of them, but hopefully, operators are changing their mindset and trying to optimise this because they know that the network ‑‑ the networks that they are supplying an automated so automating makes these notifications easy to parse is always something good in order to leverage on them.
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On the other side about how many vendors has an adopted this new format? As far as I know, this is the ones that are supported in the parser, I know about NTT, packet fabric, but. From a chat that I had last week, I know this there are around 15 that I think that will be easy to put into the solution as soon as possible. So, yeah, of these, parser is ‑‑ yeah we aim or we encourage the community, the provider to take this step and make their notifications compliant with this proposed draft format, but while we are not at this point, we don't want to stop our automation goals, so this parser is just maybe a temporary helper just to make this transition smoother for the networks consumers.
JAN ZORZ: Okay. There is no people in the audio queue but there are a lot of written questions, so I have to read them.
A.J. Wolski: Why did you decide to fork a net box rather than contribute extent?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: So this is more a question of the core development team in Nautobot from network to code. But the main idea was that there was a divergence on the roadmap of the solution. As I said before, NetBox, Nautobot today because it was for a few months ago is purely at the same kind of route but the roadmap that we have is not going to say more aggressive, but is more ambitious in terms of adding more features on the solution, and because of the divergence on the product we decided ‑‑ not this project product, this project, we decided to fork it. I don't know all the reasons because I'm not part of the core development team of network to code on this project.
JAN ZORZ: Okay. Well, people seem to like my voice because they are just writing here, nobody wants to ask their own questions. [An attendee] from Hostmaster: What is the biggest installation you have?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: The project, this plugin is released today, so there is not any end insulation yet. We have some customers on network to code really interested on this, because as ‑‑ one of them, for instance, of reporting more than 50 maintenances better day so you can see how much waste of time is for handling all this stuff. But there is not any ‑‑ how to say ‑‑ real, the insulation of this plugin yet. Obviously there are for Nautobot, for the whole project, but not for this plugin and this is the reason that the plugin is not still a stabled release. It's a version 011, if I remember correctly. So, it's still in early stages. But I believe that it is in a good stage as to being adopted, maybe just to get information about what's going on on your network, and if you finally trust the solution, you could then integrate with your network automation and take some actions.
JAN ZORZ: Okay. We have still three minutes, so I'm closing the queue.
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David Croft: Very useful and long awaited. Will this plugin work with NetBox or do you plan to port it for those of us who can't switch to Nautobot because you removed secrets?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: Sorry? Can you repeat that?
JAN ZORZ: Will this plugin work with NetBox or do you plan to port it for those of us who can't switch to an Nautobot because you removed secrets?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: Okay. I understand that this removal of secrets is something from the NetBox to Nautobot, I'm not sure about what if ‑‑ of this limitation, if it's the case. But I could just move this question to the Nautobot core team just to understand if it's something that we could be solved, because we tried to facilitate migration from NetBox users to Nautobot with portal all the data. We don't have in mind to extend the support for these two net docs today because we are focused on developing ‑‑ basically, the point is that we are are relying on some new features from Nautobot that cannot be translated or ported to NetBox and this is a limitation on the the developing of this tool. And actually we are ‑‑ we have in mind further extension of this, that will depend on some features that Nautobot is going to add‑on the new releases. Resources resources and you just answered the next question: Is it compatible with NetBox? Apparently not, equally archive this question.
How many insulations do you have already? We answered this one. Then we have:
ELVIS VELEA: When do you expect to see a stable release?
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: We are committed to this, so, it will depend on the option. We have to see more people using it, we still don't have anyone using it in production, with a real cases. But we have a customer that we are going to start the plugin in June, if I remember correctly, so, soon we are going to see these in action, for sure some problems will be raise and new features will be asked for, but we are committed to support this for having these ready to go as soon as possible.
JAN ZORZ: Okay. I think we are done with questions, and we are right on time. So, thank you Christian, thank you very much for this presentation. I would ask for the round of applause in normal circumstances, but let's have a virtual applause.
CHRISTIAN ADELL QUEROL: Thanks very much.
JAN ZORZ: So next one, Erik Bais, quite an important issue. We started to discuss this a couple of meetings ago, it's about the resilience of the human network in the RIPE community. So, please, Erik, the floor is yours.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks, Jan.
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So, when we started with the ‑‑ about this topic, the resilience of the human network in the RIPE community, we ‑‑ this started about January this year. We came together as a group of people from within the RIPE community to talk about mental health within the community, because we felt ‑‑ because of the things that we heard people that provided some feedback, people that we spoke about in the community, people that we talk on, you know, a daily basis or people that, you know, are working customers, other ISPs, and we had the feeling that there was quite some people that are struggling with the current situation with Covid‑19.
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So ‑‑ and I will introduce the group that started with this in a minute.
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The goal of this whole discussion was to see if we can open up the discussion about the impact of mental health within the community and see if there is something that we, as a RIPE community, can do and also see how, how much of an issue is this.
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During the discussions that we talked about this, we said, you know, what are the plans that we can do and how much can we do in this whole process? So this started about two years ‑‑ this was prior to the Covid pandemic, in the NLNOG community we did a presentation somewhat similar to this, but more specifically about the risk of burnout, specifically in ‑‑ talking about people working in a toxic work environment and what kind of effects that had on the stress in your personal working relationship, and also the stress ‑‑ what kind of effects that had on your body and the actual health effects that it has. At the time, this was something that we hadn't discussed prior, and it was actually something that was ‑‑ that came as a surprise to us as well, that it was still quite taboo to talk about these topics. Typically, if you know the NLNOG days, those are very technical, made by engineers for engineers. This topic came in and hit us all by surprise.
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It was ‑‑ for me, it was humbling to actually do the presentation at that time. There is a link in the presentation, you can find it in the slides. I would definitely have a look into the presentation if you want to look it back.
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So the group of people that ‑‑ based on the work that was done in the past in the NLNOG community, also what INEX had been doing, we came together, had a couple of Zoom sessions, we talked about, you know, what would be the impact within the larger RIPE community. We wanted to know would the topic actually resonate with the community? Is it something that we need to be more open about? Do we need to talk about this more? Can we provide a communication platform? And during the executions that we did, we grew more and more on how we wanted to move forward on this. So one of the things that we decided on is to talk ‑‑ you know, start with an actual questionnaire and see ‑‑ to get, you know, better feeling about how we can get this information and how, you know, the actual result is as a result from the questionnaire.
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Also, one of the things that we tried ‑‑ that we investigated with this group is to see within the community what was already done. So, obviously INEX had done something, the Dutch NLNOG group have been doing something, but that was based prior to the Covid‑19 already, because of the discussions that we were already having since 2019, is that we had daily open for all informal coffee breaks on Jitsi, where people could just come on, talk about day‑to‑day stuff, issues on, you know, how can I configure this on a Jibber router but also I have some issues with my boss, can you, you know, how are you dealing with that, or that kind of behaviour, team members that were not pulling their weight, that kind of stuff; it was very open for all to talk about. And since it's most of the time a small group of people that are talking there, it's very intimate and very ‑‑ you know, it's an actual coffee machine experience like you would get there.
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So, during the session we decided, you know, how we wanted to approach this. Like I said, the questionnaire was sent out, and you may have seen that on the RIPE member list, on the RIPE list, not the RIPE member list. And we also wanted to see if we could get a slot on the RIPE 82 Plenary, and one of the reasons for that is that we wanted to have a semi‑anonymous way for people to join the session, and also, as an added benefit, that people could actually watch it back, there is no registration or additional registration required, and after the RIPE 82 meeting, we are also planning to do an open house meetup.
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During the period since the beginning of 2021, there are also, as part of this whole process, there were some blog posts that were posted on the RIPE Labs. The one from Carolien was also posted on LinkedIn, specifically on hiring within the Covid‑19 year, and that was a bit adjusted and also posted on RIPE Labs recently and those are the links here.
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And in the INEX presentation by Dr. TIm Green was also done prior to that and here is the link to see if that ‑‑ you know, where you can watch that back, and this is specifically about the issues that stress will have and how that actually works within the brain. It's an interesting presentation to look at.
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So, why the questionnaire?
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Very specifically to see what is the state of the mental health within the community. And in that also give people the idea about, you know, think about work/home balance/private balance, especially for people, you know, most of us are actually working from home now for more than a year and getting the time, you know ‑‑ get inside in the time spent when people are not working, so what are you doing now that you don't have to spend time moving from home to office and back? Are you doing something different? You know, most of the gyms were closed in the last year; have you tried to do something else? And actually, also open up the relationship between work‑related stress and Covid‑related stress, any actual physical impacts this has on your body.
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So, example questions from the questionnaire:
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So ‑‑ and this is something that is similar to the one that I used in the presentation about burnout‑related issues. There are actually a lot of things that people didn't realise but recognise once you actually ask them or actually explain to them, you know: Do you have any health‑related issues that could relate back to stress or stress‑related causes? And if you look at the results, it's actually staggering. And some of the things that you hear also if you do ‑‑ if you do Zoom sessions or video calls or regular calls with people in the industry, the lack of energy, the time that people actually, you know, need to speed up again, but also, to step back from work and go ‑‑ and, you know, see if they can actually have some R and R time, it is staggering to see, you know, from all the respondents that actually filled in this question, people could skip questions, but on the amount of people that actually answered this question, that 42, almost 43% said there is a lack of energy. And that is, you know, especially those are signs for people that this really has an effect on all of us, you know, or a really large group that is dealing with this. You know, and it's obviously there is a lot of people that have similar issues or other related issues as well, and it's interesting to see that specifically the lack of energy as the first sign where the majority of the people that have, you know, stress‑related issues within the group of respondents of the questionnaire, that's, you know, the lack of energy, feeling tired all the time, feeling stressed, pushed, whether it's from work‑related issues or that your kids are at home, you need to home‑school them, and that were having issues with that because we're not used to that. You know, it's ‑‑ especially people with, you know, small children, that group is struggling a lot on this topic. And you see other ways where people are actually trying to overcompensate, whether it's overeating, overconsumption of alcohol or other substances, there is different things where, you know, are issues or symptoms that will actually, if you are not careful, that will actually have an effect on this and will actually extrapolate.
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So this is definitely, you know, on the questions that we asked during the questionnaire, there were some actually very private questions that we asked. You know, is it specifically relationship that's having the issue? You know, if you are normally living in a small apartment and now you have two people in the same apartment, one calling, the other one doing a Zoom session, children at home, expectation from family, but also the mourning or loss of family, friends Last year, it all adds up. And the thing is, it's not one or the other, but in a lot of cases, it's actual one on top of the other on top of the other, and it's becoming an issue besides the fact that it's ‑‑ you know, it looks at some point where people say, you know, there is no way out. You know, this is becoming a real ‑‑ when is there light at the end of the tunnel for this?
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So ‑‑ and the problem for us ‑‑ you know, I am Dutch. In the Netherlands, we have a very open way of communication, we're very open and honest on topics that we can talk about, but that is not the case in every culture or every country, and it's actually interesting to see that the topic here, although not discussed in certain countries or certain cultures, it doesn't mean that those issues are not there, and that adds additional stress.
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So how are we doing?
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And that was an interesting one, because we opened up with this question: How are you doing? Or how are you? And for some, it's a way of greeting, and it's a way of something polite, I am fine, I am okay. And ‑‑ but then, if you look at the other answer, or the possible answers that could have been given is that, you know, I already had some prior issues prior to the whole Covid‑19 pandemic, but the situation isn't helping because all the restrictions, the social isolation, you know, it's adding up to the stuff that was already there. But what was also interesting is that we had responses where people said: I had prior issues and ‑‑ but it's actually easier now because, you know, I can isolate myself from people not standing ‑‑ looking over my desk, there is less bullying at the work floor, and I can actually get more done.
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So, if being asked, how are you? What is it that you respond? Is it a courtesy question? Is it with the expected reply "yeah, I am fine", you know, to get rid of it. Or are you genuinely asking about your mental state: How do you feel? And that's specifically in culture and context and who is asking. As a Dutch person, you know, English is not my first language, and if somebody asks how are you? I tend to answer how I feel. And that's not always appropriate for, you know, the time and place or the person asking. And on the other side, sometimes that is what's actually needed.
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What happens if you actually tell how you feel? What happens if you actually say like you are struggling with the whole Covid‑19 social distancing, the kids running around the house and you are trying to juggle your work, near future issues or stressed by the financial stability, how is that ‑‑ how do you feel currently about, you know, not being able to go out, see your friends, not having a relationship or that you suffer from the loss of somebody you knew or loved?
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So one of the questions in the questionnaire, or one of the questions in the questionnaire was: Do you worry about your financial situation? And from all people that actually answered that question, we had about 27% that said: I worry about my job, financial stability and this is stressful.
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And while we had ‑‑ at least in the Netherlands ‑‑ the government provided a lot of support for employers to keep a lot of people on staff, we still hear within the community that people have been laid off. We also saw in the responses for the questionnaire that ‑‑ specifically if you look at, you know, certain questions and match them, that people have been, you know, very careful about their own job stability, and that has, you know ‑‑ because of its ‑‑ the stress and the anxiety of being punished for something that goes wrong in your work, you know, it doesn't add to an open communication platform that, as a group of people, where, you know, and the team that you work with, if people try to hide their impact if something goes wrong, you know, it doesn't ‑‑ it generally doesn't help to get things done and have them ‑‑ how do I say this? ‑‑ how this helps to adjust the situation that caused the issues at work. Specifically, you know, if you work with maintenance, stuff goes wrong, you work long days, and in the night you need to do your maintenance as well. You know, at some point it ‑‑ people are being used as a resource that needs to be, you know, put to the end, and that was already the case prior to the whole Covid‑19 issue.
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So talking about emotions and feelings, is it actually accepted within your culture and in your ‑‑ on the work floor?
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So, in certain countries and religion groups, there is a taboo where, you know, certain topics are not to be discussed at all. If you look at the statistical numbers, depression, suicide officially doesn't exist in certain cultures or countries, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, or being gay is criminalised. If it's not being openly discussed, it doesn't mean that it's not there.
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And, yes, we asked some very serious questions within the ‑‑ in the questionnaire as well, specifically about suicide, and we actually reached out to the 113 suicide prevention lines in the Netherlands, and they say that this is not a problem for females; the majority of the people that are actually ‑‑ see no way out out of the current situation, are male. This is a problem with the 40‑ to 70‑year group, and depression is the most common health issue within this group, and per year, and this is just for the Netherlands alone. We have about 1,900 people that die by suicide, which is an average of 5 per day, and the amount of attempts is about 25 times higher, about 135 per day, and that's just for the Netherlands. And the group of young people dealing with depression is rising currently at an alarming rate and there is still a huge taboo to talk about this. This topic is something that we really need to be more open about. Also, we need to spot this earlier, especially on the depression, and people need to get professional support, and if you are dealing with this, please do reach out to the suicide hotlines.
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And, as I said, within the questionnaire, we also had a question like this, and it's ‑‑
JAN ZORZ: Sorry to interrupt, there is half a minute left, if you can wrap up.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks. So there is definitely ‑‑ this is not something that is not happening in our community as well; this is definitely something that we struggle with, part of the whole, you know, burnout and depression part that we are experiencing within this industry.
So where do we stand currently? Most of the people responded about the experience of stress in relation to work, private‑related issues, kids being home‑schooled while trying to work, feeling of insecurity about financial future. And some responded about burnout‑related effects and experiences.
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Is there a magic solution?
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Unfortunately, not. However, we need to talk about this, being heard, recognise that someone isn't alone. It already helps, and yes, as a community, we can provide ways to discuss these topics and to relieve the feeling and perception of being alone in this.
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And perhaps offer some assistance by listening or even acknowledging that work‑related stress is more common than what we think.
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So, the RIPE community is all of this. It's not only that we're talking about here in v4 or v6 routing policies and charging schemes, and we need each other as a healthy community. That also means that we need to provide assistance for people when we are not feeling okay or stressed.
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So what's next is we're planning an open house meet ‑up after the RIPE 82 meeting, that still needs to be scheduled, and the mental health initiative group is going to review the results of the questionnaire and community response and discuss the topic on ‑‑ to see if we can get a more ‑‑ a better communication platform. Decide from there on where and how.
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How can you help?
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Talk to the Programme Committee in your local NOG or your IXP, see if you can get these topics discussed locally, provide a listening ear for your people that need to talk. And please avoid judging people about mental health‑related issues. It's how we perceive and react that really makes a difference in their lives.
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So, if you need to reach out, you know, you can talk to the people within the Mental Health Initiative Group. We're not professionals. We care, we listen, but perhaps give some advice. Feel free to reach out to Vesna currently, Eileen or myself, and in case you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, call a local practitioner and reach out to a national suicide hotline.
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Any questions? And sorry for overrunning.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: Thanks a lot, Erik. I think it is really, really good to have this content, this position in the meeting. It was really nice to hear, to talk ‑‑ to hear you talking about that, the discussion in the chat was very active. As it's traditional for the Opening Plenary, we are already quite pressed on time, so I will let on the people who actually do have questions, but, please, discuss this further in the break.
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So, we have somebody in the microphone ‑‑ no, the person in the video queue just withdrew, that is very sad. Then I will read out a question ‑ no, a comment, which is totally appropriate in this setting, by my colleague Florian Streibelt. He says: Not a question but a huge thank you to all people involved and thank you for bringing that topic to the Plenary, it's one of the things making the RIPE community so special. And I think this is totally true.
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So let's see ‑‑ we have Vesna who wants to talk to us.
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SPEAKER: I am Vesna, and I want to thank Erik and the PC for making space at the Plenary for this presentation and I just wanted everybody to see my face and if you need someone to talk, please talk to me or Erik, it depends what your topic is. I am also a trusted contact, a trained first aid person, so I can help, at least by listening. Thank you.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks, Vesna.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: Thanks a lot. So we have one additional comment in the queue. I will try to read it out. It's very long.
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It's Yolandi from NAPAfrica IXP, and she says: This is a very important discussion to have as working from home has changed our daily routine. I find that people are struggling to find the balance and walk away from their desk tops to take a break or do some exercise. What is your advice around this? Do you think employees are now expecting you to be online every minute of the day? Personally, I notice that work has become more important than my personal life as I am constantly checking e‑mails and not paying attention to my health.
So maybe, Erik, a quick comment.
ERIK BAIS: I think you answered your question here by yourself, especially the idea that you're already neglecting your own health above your ‑‑ above work and private balance. That should be a pointer for yourself to say, you know, I might need to have ‑‑ I might need to change this. And especially in your day‑to‑day operation, you know, schedule in your agenda time away from your desk. Schedule time ‑‑ you know, there is never an appropriate time, especially if it's not in your daily routine already, to go and do a physical activity. Take a walk, go for golf, go for gym, you know, something that takes you out of your workplace. For myself, I have the opportunity to work in an office because, you know, all the employees are not there, so I am actually using the office because of that. But it actually helps in keeping a routine and actually taking it from there.
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And feel free to reach out to us and see where that might work for you. And I'll be definitely, after the presentation, I'll be on SpacialChat to reach out and talk to people there.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: Thank you. Mirjam wants to talk to us.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Sorry, very quick. I know we are running over time and you know how I am a stickler with time.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: This topic is important. Let's take a couple of minutes.
MIRJAM KUHNE: I just wanted to add to what Erik has already said. During this RIPE meeting, we are also providing some space for exercising actually in the afternoon coffee breaks, so if you go to the parallel events on the RIPE meeting, RIPE 82 meeting page, you can find like stretching, like five‑minute sessions every afternoon where you can or not go away from your screen because she is actually showing you what to do, I am doing it sometimes during the week with her and it's a great break to have in between work.
FRANZISKA LICHTBLAU: Cool. So I think, Erik, you were very on point with your answer to Yolandi's question. She says we are fast to acknowledge the wrong but slow to change what needs to be done. Thank you for the answer. A lot of us needed to hear this. And I think with this I would like to close this, and, everyone, if you really think you are not affected by all of this, do what I just did, go through Erik's slides and see which boxes you tick, you will probably be surprised. So thank you, Erik, and we will all meet later in SpacialChat.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks for the opportunity.
JAN ZORZ: Thank you, Erik. I have a notification. Daniel sent me a note that the chat in the meeting gets stuck for some people and they cant get to to work again by detaching it. That worked for me because I was surprised that nobody is talking on the chat and then I detached it and it started working. So that is one thing.
.
And the other thing is, yes, you already closed the session. The session is now closed but now I would like to invite Frank van Vliet to talk in the lunch time about the RIPE 82 cybersecurity challenge. And with that let's close the session. Thank you everybody.
(Lunch break)
LIVE CAPTIONING BY
MARY McKEON, RMR, CRR, CBC
DUBLIN, IRELAND.
